Life is a potpourri of the good, the bad and the ugly. There is beauty, calm, creativity and conversely there is heartache, confusion, and struggle. Both good shit and bad shit happens to us as part of our everyday lives. This much I have always understood, the balance, the feast or famine, the yin and yang of existing. What I didn’t understand until much later in life is all the shit is ultimately good shit. Bad things happen yes, but our growth from those things can be excellent fertilizer for change, for redemption, for later happiness. Tragedies are the seeds of resilience. Not all bad things garner these results, but many can. 

Looking back at the untimely death of my youngest sister Amy at 36 to leukemia forced me to grow and change in incalculable ways, from how I live my life, my daily gratitude, to my what the fuck attitude knowing I can be gone tomorrow make today count. Was it all worth not having Amy longer, no, absolutely not, the timing of  her exit was not my call. It was up to the one-eyed cat at the big roulette wheel in the sky. I was able to use Amy’s death to redefine my life and choose a different way to be, that bad shit let me see the fragility of life and pivot for the better one.

Not everyone chooses to take a tragedy and come away years later with learning and gifts. Amy’s death put the last nail in my mother’s coffin. Though my mother lived another 15 years her heart was broken beyond repair, she was angry at life and retreated. She retreated to the degree of cutting off all but a couple of relationships and none of those were with her children. She rolled up the sidewalks in her life, sold what was left to the circus and ran away. When bad things happen, we have a myriad of options. Over the years since Amy’s death our choices, my mother’s and mine, are just examples on the menu. Not all my choices were positive and not all of hers were negative, I hope. What  they all were was part of the murky mix of adjustments, emotions and reactions. 

Ultimately, I try to remember when bad shit is happening, pushing and tearing at my ideas of what I hoped my life or day would look like that I can allow grace to come in and release my ideas around control, my To Do list and all things Virgoan. Sometimes we slide into a bad shit zone where things we didn’t want to happen stack on top of each other creating a bad shit sandwich.  When this has happenes, more often than not, I am in a very different place a year later, sometimes a different job, location, or sometimes a new place in my head and heart. It was like the Universe came in and yanked me off a path shuffling me onto the road less traveled or one that I had avoided because it terrified me. 

What is most difficult of being yanked off a path is that it creates so much confusion. What is going on? Is this a blip or is this the place I am now? I don’t know where I am and what to do? Questioning my life, my goals, my purpose, and when on fact it is bad thinking mentally backtracking wondering  and  if I missed a turn back up the road or was I hyper-focused on the wrong thing? Hyper focusing on the wrong thing is common. We do that all the time, right? Graduate from school, find a partner, find a job, have a family, get a raise, buy a house, do, do, do, check, check, check. When things implode, we look up at this text book of life that doesn’t always resemble who we are and what we want. We were just following the pattern that others set down. What if everyone is doing that and nobody is making a life and creating their own pattern? 

Creating your own pattern is what can happen when we are pulled out of our life by some of that bad shit. It forces us to look at how we feel, what we think, really think. We tune out the To Do’s and take stock using our internal compass. The one we forgot about, or never met, our soul, our inner voice, our true north. The pattern, the path that hard yank lands us in is a new land and we are a stranger in a strange land of us. Here is where the work starts, with a counselor, a book, a coach, a journal of unlocking ourselves and starting a dialogue with our present wants and needs. 

It is always the bad shit that can push us into change, but we all don’t go willingly, or at all, but we have a chance at redemption and meaning when we do. The reality is we don’t change much less learn when everything goes according to plan, when good shit happens. We sail through good days, good shit congratulating ourselves on good choices, good genes, being organized, or smart but mostly we are unconsciously muddling through our life just trying to check those boxes we set up years earlier without ever revisiting those choices again. The pattern, the plan the thing that everyone else is doing so it must be right? Right? No, just like fashion one size does not fit all. It never has and never will. That is just marketing bullshit. So, the next time bad shit yanks you out of your shoes stop, pay attention, listen to your soul, your song, your internal guidance system and know that bad shit is just fertilizer for the changes you are about to make. Things will be murky at best for a while, there will be crying, swearing, massive confusion as things get darker before they get light but when they do, if you choose to show up for yourself the result will be better than you could imagine. So, hold tight as the shit hits the fan it’s going to be a bumpy ride. 

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